She slid down off the boulder easily and stalked toward him, her body angled, her murderous hand held at length beside her. She was tall enough to reach the lower limbs of the sycamores. Her long strides crossed the distance rapidly. He saw his bullets strike her, but it was like shooting into the earth – they ricocheted away or sunk in her muddy flesh. She took no notice. Her movement was marionette-like, suggesting human locomotion, but ultimately strange.
She began to sing as she came;
‘Uwe'la na'tsïkû'. Su' sä' sai'.
The rifle went empty. He gripped it by the barrel and got slowly to his feet, holding it shoulder height.
When she was within reach he swung with all he had. It was like striking a telegraph pole. The shock traveled up his arm. The stock of the rifle broke against her face.
She swiped at him with her single claw. He barely stepped aside, but her back hand struck him in the chest and knocked all the wind from him. He landed on his back a few feet away, wheezing.
She stepped towards him but stopped short. Bucks bleeding hand was gripping her ankle.
She squatted down and slid her jagged finger under Buck’s chin, raising up his head to look into his eyes. For a moment, Ben saw them regarding each other. Buck’s expression was of stricken disbelief. Hers was a strange mix of curiosity and pity. Then with one thrust her finger entered his throat up to the knuckle. The end of it protruded from his left eye socket, the resident eyeball skewered on the tip.
She flung Buck’s body down contemptibly and turned her black grin on Ben again. Then Ben saw it. In the palm of that deadly hand was a dark, bulbous lump, pulsating, like a cake rising and falling in a cooling oven.
Her heart was in her hand.
“Hey! Spearfinger! Hey, you raggedy ass old liver-eater! Remember me?”
It was Doc, calling from down below in Tsalagi.
She turned at the sound. Her incessant grin faltered.
“Come on down here, you old child suckin’ bitch! I got a liver for you to take! One you missed! Remember my voice?”
For a moment the old woman stood there, her head cocked towards his voice. Her expression softened. If possible, it was more terrible to see a look approaching human on that ancient, monstrous face. Leathery lids slid thoughtfully over the big black frog eyes.
She turned from Ben as if he was nothing. In two long strides she leapt down below. He saw her disappear into the darkness, her long white hair and the ragged blanket streaming behind her.
He scrambled to his feet. His ribs were moving against each other, pushing the air out of him. He reeled drunkenly and got to the edge.
Down below he saw Spearfinger rushing down the embankment. Doc was standing with his back to a big oak tree, his Bowie knife in his hand.
“Doc! It’s in her hand! Her heart’s in her hand!”
Ben flung himself over the lip of rock and crashed down the flinty slope, bouncing off trees and rolling, sometimes head over heels.
He came to a stop on his belly and forced himself to his hands and knees. His face was purpling. Through watery eyes he saw Doc and Spearfinger. They looked like an adult dancing with a toddler, hand in hand, waltzing left and right, turning. Doc’s knife flashed in the moon glow, crossed with Speafinger’s claw like the weapons of a pair of old time duelists.
Ben heaved himself up and stumbled towards them, hugging his throbbing sides. The run was only eight or nine feet, but it was taxing. There was a dead log directly behind Spearfinger. Ben set his foot on top of it and used his momentum to propel himself up and onto her back.
He had meant to tackle the pair of them to the ground, but grappling the ogress was like clenching a knotty old oak tree. She didn’t even stagger under his weight, and the jagged angles of her body poked him wherever he gripped her.
Ben’s appearance momentarily distracted both of them though, and while the old witch’s head turned to regard him with an annoyed snarl, Doc’s hand popped free and he lost his knife.
Her hand broke out of Doc’s grip, came up, and grabbed Ben by the hair, wrenching him from her back and flinging him to the earth between her feet.
She brought her claw down to dispatch him, but Doc was there, hugging her arm with his whole body.
Then Spearfinger screamed.
Ben was reminded again of the howl of a lonesome wildcat in the night. Her voice was unearthly, all pretense of humanity swept away by her primal agony, as Doc slashed with the broken end of Fisher’s knife at her beating palm. Her hand erupted in a burst of blackish, foul smelling blood that spurted down on Ben.
She twisted and flung Doc away like a biting dog.
Ben got to his feet again. He found Doc’s knife in the dirt.
He swept it up as he stood, and hacked at her clawed hand.
She flinched away and swung at him again, opening a gash on his forearm.
She stabbed at his chest, and he ducked under her arm. The wicked claw stuck into the trunk of the tree Doc had been standing in front of.
Flipping the Bowie in his hand, Ben gripped her wrist and drove the point into the back of her hand with all that was left in him, feeling it punch through and bury itself in the bark behind.
Spearfinger threw her head back and let a long and plaintive call, like baying wolves, yowling catamounts, and a warren of screaming rabbits all at once burst and then taper from her shriveled lips. She shuddered in his grip and fell to her knees like a supplicant before the knotted oak.
Her head bowed and her blanket fell from her twisted, muddy shoulders. Then she sank inward and was still but for the wind stirring her clumped hair. Her black, pungent blood streamed down the length of her arm, seeping from around the hilt of the knife that pinned her to the tree. The smell from the wound was like the pungent stink of peat and rotting compost.
Ben fell on his ass and sat there doubled over, fighting to breathe through his broken ribs.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“You OK, a-tsu-tsa?” Doc asked.
He managed to nod, but speaking caused a painful heaving in his chest. He nearly passed out.
The old man knew his mind though.
“On the Trail, one night in the wagon,” he said. “Like I told you, I didn’t see her, but I heard her. Heard her song, like it was in my ear. There was this boy. He was sicker’n me. Dyin.’ And I said ‘Spearfinger, don’t take my liver tonight. Take this boy’s. He’s sick anyway.’ I thought I was dreamin.’ In the morning he was dead and I was alive.”
Ben looked up at him. Doc’s eyes were shining and he turned away, wrinkling his nose at the stench pouring out of the dead thing pinned to the tree.
“Come on, let’s get out of the wind,” he said, helping Ben to his feet.
Ben groaned. He had come to catch a murderer and was returning empty handed.
“What’m I gonna say?” he whispered.
“About Jimpsey?” said Doc. “In Tahlequah, tell ‘em the truth. In Ft. Smith, lie.”
Ben nodded. Concerning the woman-killer Jimpsey Waterback, the Cherokee would have their truth, and the white men theirs.
He was just the man to deliver both.
This one came about from an old article supposedly published in the Tombstone Epitaph which told of a group of ranchers sighting a Thunderbird in the sky over the desert between the Whetstone and Huachuca Mountains. There’s supposed to be an old photograph of the thing, but the ones I’ve seen are obviously fakes.
The Bone Wars of the 1870’s are really fascinating. Dueling paleontoligists racing to finds, sabotaging each other’s digs in a contest to see who got their names in the history books.
In Thunder’s Shadow
September 25, 1876
To Professor O.C. Marsh, Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut
I have arrived in Delirium Tremens in Arizona Territory and met with the Drucker & Dobbs Mining Co.'s geologist, Elvin Planterbury, who contacted your office about the fossil he discovered in their main copper shaft. Fortunately Mr. Planterb
ury was able to preserve the specimen before it was broken up and sold off for the price of a few drinks. It is, in my opinion, a tarsal fragment from a large pteranodon (most probably longiceps). I have personally never seen a fossil so well preserved. Work in the mine has necessarily not been halted to await my arrival, and examination of the location at which the fragment was uncovered is impossible. I intend to survey the sedimentary substrate of the upper area of the surrounding Huachuca Mountains. I have hopes that should it prove fruitful, my work might warrant the assignment of a team from the Geological Survey. I was able to purchase a quantity of dynamite from the company as well as sufficient provisions and gear, but I shall likely require more funds to ship any samples I find for your appraisal.
I was delayed in finding a guide. Most will not set foot in the Huachucas for fear of the Apache, but I have finally secured the assistance of a local hunter named Neb Bukes. He tells me that 'Huachuca’ is Apachean for ‘Thunder.’ We are to set out on the 28th.
This will be my last posted letter until my return.
Deferentially,
Calvin J. Pabodie
They hunched in a low tent in the dark desert, Pabodie and the old hunter, Neb, with a hissing lantern between them. It was raining every way but up. Outside, the pack mules shook their bristled manes and bowed their necks beneath the slanting silver drops.
Pabodie had his sketchpad on his knee. He was finishing up a drawing of a rattlesnake they'd seen curled on a rock along the trail earlier that day, aptly coaxing out the beaded patterns on its back with a stub of charcoal pinched between his blackened fingers, while the one-eyed hunter chewed jerky and sipped something hard smelling from a dented tin cup. Pabodie paused in stroking the narrow iris of the reptile to consider his companion, and caught him staring back with his one blue eye. The other had been lost in some long ago adventure. Its gaping socket was neither patched nor bandaged. Although the tenant eye was gone, the sagging lid still twitched and moved like a dutiful but deranged watchman keeping guard over a long dead charge.
"Pretty pitcher," Neb offered.
"Thank you," said Pabodie.
"So," said the older man, blowing out his gaunt cheeks and flecking his rusty beard with dried meat. "Lemme take a gander at this bone you're all fired up about."
Pabodie flipped his sketchbook shut and carefully lifted the fossil from his knapsack. It was only four or five inches long, but holding it made him catch his breath. With his fingers he was reaching back through the eons, touching a creature that had cast its shadow across a younger, wilder world. It was a world he had dreamed of seeing, ever since he was a small boy lying on his belly, staring at the strange creatures living and dying in the shallow tidal pools of his native Kingsport.
Old Neb wasn't nearly as taken with it.
He took the fossil in his hands and held it to the light, squinting at it like a man considering purchasing a lump of excrement from a swindler who swore it was priceless.
"This little thing?"
"Yes," said Pabodie irritably, as if one of his own children were being
maligned. "Please be careful."
Neb screwed up his face, uncomprehending.
"What exactly am I lookin' at?"
"It's a fragment from the lower skeleton of a pteranodon."
"A what?"
"A huge prehistoric flying creature."
"Hell, Mr. Pabodie," Neb said, passing the fossil back (it swiftly disappeared into its swaddling in the cushioned depths of Pabodie's knapsack), "that thing's older'n I am. I figured it was fresh bones you was out after."
"Well," Pabodie said, allowing himself a snicker, "we'd be hard pressed to find fresh bones. I'm afraid this species died almost eighty million years ago."
"Naw," Neb said, waving his weathered hand and sipping his potion. "I seen one, 'couple 'o months back."
Pabodie smiled slowly.
"I hardly think..."
"I said I seen one," Neb said, plainly challenging him to doubt aloud again.
Pabodie shook his head, but said nothing.
Neb set aside his cup and took out his tobacco and makings.
"Dan Spector down at the Moderado promised me fifty dollars gold if I could catch him a live bear for a bear garden he wanted to build out back of his place, on account of the Thursday night cockfights over at the Mexicans' down the street was cuttin' into his business. I'd heard tell of black bears high up in the Huachucas where the conifers grow, so I got me a cage and a string of goats. ‘Spent a couple weeks up there till I got one."
Neb finished rolling a cigarette and lit it. The match glow shined in the hollow of his eye socket, but did not penetrate its depths. Pabodie's attention was drawn to it. It was like peering into the end of a gun. The wide black iris of his intact eye hardly looked any different. Pabodie knew then that he was sharing his fortunes with a madman, for this was no greening session; what the hunter told next, he sincerely believed.
"I'm hitchin' the bear cage up to my mules, when of a sudden, this big shadow comes up in front of the sun, cools everything down. Even the bear looks up. And the noise! Sounded like a hunnerd widows screamin' all at once in the belly of a lion."
He planted the cigarette in the corner of his lips and held out his arms for emphasis.
"Swooped down and picked up that bear, cage and all, just about ripped my mules out of their traces." He pantomimed a rifle shooting. "I cut loose on it with old Mazeppa, but it took a high grain load like a buffalo cow takes note of a mosquito's peter. Flew way up, off over the mountains."
He threw up his hands and blew smoke.
"Cost me my gold and the price of the cage. ‘Had to sell off my mules. Been lookin' for a way to get back up there and go after it. Then along you came, all providential like. What I figured was, it was a thunderbird like the 'Paches talk about. You call it a terra-whatsit, whatever you want, but,” he shrugged, “same thing. You're welcome to all the bones we can carry back, Mister Pabodie. I want somethin' else..."
Pabodie’s smirk had spread wider throughout the story. Neb presently noticed it and frowned deeply beneath his bushy mustache.
"You still disbelieve me."
"Well...," said Pabodie, not wanting to give offense and thinking swiftly of a placation. "What you saw was most likely some sort of condor. For instance, the California gymnogyps has a thirteen foot wingspan..."
"Its wings stretched fifty feet if they were an inch. You think I'm talkin' about some goddamned buzzard?” he exclaimed, the whiskey on his breath beating upon Pabodie like heat from an open furnace. “I ain't touched in the head, though by that smarmy goddamned look, you think so. Dan Spector gimme that look too. Him and all them goddamned drunkards in the Moderado, when I told 'em what happened. I been huntin' up and down this land for goin' on twenty years, Mister Pabodie. If I say I seen a goddamned thunderbird, who in the hell are you to..."
Neb's tirade was cut short by the sound of thunder like the reverberant crashing of a gargantuan washtub tumbling across the sky. Outside, Pabodie’s horse and the mules screamed.
"They're afraid of the thunder?" Pabodie asked anxiously as Neb drew up his rifle case from the corner of the tent.
Neb threw open the case and bought out the big Sharps rifle he affectionately called Mazeppa.
“They're afraid of somethin.'"
He pushed a long bullet into the breech of his rifle as lightning turned the tent walls blue. Another avalanche of thunder exploded over the empty land.
The rain jarringly ceased its incessant pattering on the canvas, as if someone had dammed up the flow in heaven. The animals outside whinnied their anxiety. One of the cries abruptly altered in pitch and rose above the rest. It was one of the mules, braying like Pabodie had never heard an animal do before. It was a prolonged, harsh sound, as of a woman being murdered slowly.
"One side!" shouted Neb.
He pushed past Pabodie and threw back the tent flap. The sounds of the screaming animals and the blowing storm filled their
ears.
Pabodie stared as Neb jammed his battered hat on his head and went out into the silver flecked darkness. The lantern threw a shaft of light on the bucking animals. Pabodie's horse and the remaining pack mule strained against their tethers on the tall saguaro cactus to which they’d been tied, tripping in their hobbles to get away.
Of the second mule, there was no sign. Then Pabodie narrowed his bespectacled eyes and perceived the missing mule’s braided tether still fastened around the trunk of the saguaro, pulled taut under its curved arms, trailing mysteriously into the dark sky like a Hindu rope trick.
The wind was tremendous, threatening to buckle their shelter. The rain was still driving all around. Yet it did not strike their tent, or the horses, or the ground encompassing their small camp, as if a great umbrella hung overhead.
Then there was a second tremulous flicker of lightning. The camp lit up like a photographer's studio.
Pabodie caught a glimpse of a massive shape suspended overhead, a huge, black shadow whose bulk shielded them from the rain like a tarpaulin. For a minute Pabodie thought that was just what it was –a large revival tent canvas uprooted by the tempest, hovering overhead by some unlikely trick of the converging winds. Dangling from the middle of the gigantic shadow was the missing pack mule, bugging out its eyes in terror.
Something clutched it by the spine. It hung limp as a kitten in its mother’s mouth.
Even as the sky went dark again, Pabodie knew what it was. The Kingsport boy in him who had waded hip deep into the churning ocean imagining legendary beasts and cities beneath the waves with all the desperate faith of one born out of time let out an exultant scream that rang in his book and data scarred brain. Though that mature part of him that had attended two universities and sobered through the years as a teetotaler of wonder curled up in fear and bewilderment, the wide eyed boy in him gripped what he all too briefly beheld above the camp in both hands and guzzled the sight until drunk. This was something neither Marsh, nor Cope, nor any stodgy old ditch digging professor had ever seen. This was his alone.
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